


Regret to Inform

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Family, Friendship, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 19:45:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4234302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and the Barneses, his family according to his heart and the official documents of the United States Army.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Regret to Inform

Steve didn't have any next of kin, nor did he have a permanent address after he gave up his room to go to Camp Lehigh, but the Army knew what to do with orphans of all ages and so his paychecks and his mail found him, even on the road with the USO. Nonetheless, he still, in the privacy of his mind, liked to pretend that his orders to join a fighting unit were lost somewhere on someone's desk while they tried to figure out where Cpt. Rogers, Steven G. was currently bunking down. 

After he rescued Bucky and the others, after Captain America's showgirl career was ended in favor of darker deeds, there was more paperwork to go with the new billets. Steve still didn't have a permanent address or any next of kin, but now it might actually matter where his personal effects were sent in the increasingly possible chance of his unfortunate demise. 

"Why don't you just put down my folks?" Bucky suggested, looking over from where he was filling out his own forms seconding him from the 107th to the SSR. Next to the pile of completed sheets was an envelope with his letter home, unsealed because it awaited the censors. Telegrams had been sent already, but Bucky had written a short letter that said more than "I'm alive," but possibly not much more because it wasn't a very thick envelope. "They're already putting a blue star up in the window for you."

Steve didn't have blood family, but he did have people he'd had to tell that he was leaving Brooklyn and at the top of the list, ahead of his boss at the shop and landlady, had been the Barneses. They were as close as he came to blood kin; he had been an honorary fifth Barnes child for most of his life just as Bucky had been welcome in his mother's home. And if Mrs. Barnes had been just a little more insistent on Steve's attendance at a Sunday supper after Bucky had been packed off to the Army, Steve hadn't really minded for more reasons than just the opportunity for a roast dinner. There'd been tearful hugs and promises to write -- more than Bucky did -- when he'd left, officially to go down to DC to draw things for the war effort (maps or propaganda posters, he'd left it a little vague). He still got dutiful letters from the younger Barnes siblings, along with the occasional packet of treats and offers to purchase whatever items he couldn't find where he was because they knew how hard it was for Bucky to keep in socks and toothpaste, even if Steve was only in DC.

"I should," Steve agreed. He probably should have listed the Barneses before the procedure, if for no other reason than they'd have gotten his modest savings and whatever death benefits there'd been should he have died from Erskine's cocktails and Stark's machine. "Did you tell them where I was?"

Bucky looked up from where he'd been lining up the carbon paper between the sheets of the latest form to be required in duplicate and gave Steve a cocked eyebrow of sarcastic disbelief that he knew well. "Hell, no. That's going to be your job, _Captain_. You get to tell my Ma that you've been lying to her for how many months, for which you should be grateful that there's an ocean between you. And you get to tell my sister why her love for Captain America is going to remain unrequited, for which an ocean isn't enough distance."

Steve winced guiltily; he'd never been comfortable with the deceit and that had been before he'd known of Becca's movie star crush moving from Clark Gable to Captain America.

"I saved her brother, that's got to count for something, right?"

It was the first time either of them had spoken aloud of what Steve had done without cloaking it in terms that made it easier to swallow for both of them; Bucky had griped at him for half the march through Italy about his "idiocy," which extended to everything from letting himself be used as a lab rat to doing his first combat jump solo and behind enemy lines to storming a HYDRA base without backup or any idea of what he was getting into. Steve had not missed the real anger behind Bucky's words, but he'd also not missed that all of those angry words were really just "thank you" writ large and profane.

"That might wash with my parents," Bucky said, not looking up for reasons that had nothing to do with him needing to watch what he was doing. "But Becca's got another brother in reserve and only one heart to break, never to be healed. _Ever_."

Becca wasn't quite the melodramatic girl she'd been in her early teens anymore, but her parents still called her Sarah Heartburn, a twist on the name of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, with good reason.

Steve needed blessings from Colonel Phillips before he could write those letters; the real identity of Captain America was still a secret. Bucky was correct on both accounts -- his parents considered the rescue of their elder son to be more than recompense for the lies, but Becca now hated him. At least until Bucky and Steve turned up on the family doorstep after having both snuck out of DC and then used Captain America's fame to get them priority transit up to New York. They'd both been gone for more than a year and there'd been hugs all around, even from Becca, and the only tears had been Steve's after Mrs. Barnes had put her hand to his chest to feel his steady heartbeat and clear lungs, smiled, and said "Oh, if your mother could see you now."

It would be the last time either of them made it back to New York before, well, before everything got weird. The Barneses received the telegram informing them of the death of their son, Sergeant Barnes, James B. in the autumn of '44, and exchanged one of the blue star flags in the front window for gold. Six months later, after another telegram, they replaced the second flag. Seventy years later, the flags and the telegrams, both delicate with age, were on display in carefully monitored preservation cases at the Smithsonian, a gift of Rebecca Barnes Proctor along with a few pre-war photos of the Barnes children plus Steve Rogers because a neighbor had been a photographer with the _Herald_. The pain was old, if not yet faded, when Steve saw them in 2012, but it was mixed with the fondness he still felt for what had been his second family. He lived in a future that saw Captain America as an icon and a tool to be used and that there'd been people who'd known Steve Rogers and mourned his loss, it was a comfort.

Two years later, he would return to that corner of the exhibit for comfort he wasn't sure he deserved. It had been bad enough when he'd had to write to the Barneses after Bucky's fall -- they'd forgiven him, of course they had, even if Steve had been the only reason Bucky had still been in uniform -- but this... this was something else. There wasn't enough forgiveness in the world for this, not so long as Bucky was still out there and probably not even after that. And there wasn't enough time or an ocean big enough to keep him from feeling like he'd taken the most precious gift he'd ever been given and treated it badly and without regard. It didn't matter who had caused the actual damage; the first fault lay with him.

It would be years before he found out that the photos in that display case had been the start of Bucky's recovery of himself, a way to pin down the images floating around in his head, to mark them as true and real and _his_ in a different way than the Winter Soldier's memories were his. Seeing his own boyish face in a photograph had been the first time he'd truly accepted that he'd been -- still was, could be -- Bucky Barnes.

Bucky's forgiveness, when it came, was absolute and permanent and Steve didn't know what to do with it. "You don't have to want it, Steve," Bucky told him. "That's the joy of giving gifts to your family: they have to take them and say thank you no matter what."

Steve could only try to smile. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," Bucky replied, patting him on the shoulder before walking away. "Just be happy it's not socks."

**Author's Note:**

> [This was originally posted to Tumblr](http://laporcupina.tumblr.com/post/102020301169/cap-drabble-regret-to-inform) if you'd like to like or reblog there.


End file.
